An exploration of conflict through logic and nonsense in Lewis Carroll’s children’s fantasy stories
Alice in Wonderland is well known for being both absurd and logical. I love both nonsense and logic, just like children, because for them logic, and in fact for adults too, represents a safe world, a world where there are answers, there is a correct answer, and you can move within it , such as inside a square, and know what the angles are and how they bisect. When you get to the real world or the natural world or the world of the sea, everything is constantly changing, and children are more aware of this than adults, because they are constantly growing, and I think Lewis Carroll was very aware of this when he made Alice grew tall and short, a bit like in a funny house of mirrors. But, in fact, that is the world seen from the point of view of a child.
I think what’s revolutionary about his work is that no one has ever said, “Oh my God, the world through the eyes of a child must look really crazy,” and I think that’s what’s so precious about his writing. I think it was radical. for the Victorians and was perhaps a novelty in the history of thought. Because he was a professor of mathematics, Lewis Carroll realized how sharply it contrasted with the logic and mathematics of the so-called adult world, but of course adults, while using logic and mathematics, are subject to this terrible evolution that is happening in themselves. and their bodies, and the world around them, and ignore it by focusing on what they can accomplish mentally.
In Wonderland and the Looking Glass, we get into conflicts between the characters, they talk a lot of nonsense and are quite worried about the fact that they disagree with each other and are in conflict. They are argumentative and show the conflict in a different light and perhaps the light of something more distant.
You see Alice subject to all of these experiences, and she doesn’t agree with a lot of them, so she’s in conflict with them, but it’s a dream conflict that’s episodic and goes from one conflict to another without ever being resolved. But it’s still playful conflict, Lewis Carroll shows that conflict can be very playful, absurd, taken to the extreme or even trivialized and that’s part of the wonder of his books. It’s something that appeals to me as someone who has written plays. of my life and dealt with conflicts on stage continuously, sometimes very seriously, sometimes comically, with the realization that every dramatic incident I’ve ever written about, whether serious or comedic, could also be acted out like the other. For example, serious could be acted as comedy, and comedy could be acted seriously, and those are the kinds of things that I think Lewis Carroll was fully aware of.
In the Alice stories, children, in particular, can see the conflict going on in the action, but they also see at the same time that it’s very silly. This could be a good perspective for them in terms of understanding what is going on in life and also a good perspective for us too! And, of course, children’s lives are entirely one of conflict from the moment they open their eyes in the morning to the moment they close them at night. there is not a minute in the day that I do not think that the child is not in conflict with the adult world. From the time they don’t want to drink their milk or go to school or go downstairs feet first instead of head first, whatever, they’re in conflict with adults.
And it must make the world seem very absurd to them, because it is spent entirely on conflict. Maybe they make it into a silly conflict just so they can put up with it. This gives them more perspective as they see others (in the stories) struggle with logic and nonsense at the same time, and also get to see that what is being said on both sides is ultimately really funny.
That’s what we as adults see when we watch a drama on stage, we have a perspective and we can see that it could be a comedy, and we can see the tragic side of comedy because we have a certain distance from it. And kids can take that leap and take a step back, and laugh at themselves and at adults, within the conflict, and that’s an amazing thing to see and experience.
That perhaps is the key to understanding how not to be in conflict, is that one comes to have a sense of one’s own detachment and fullness of life. We are not haggard from the conflict, but we remain present and see through it, which is perhaps what the world at large misses.
Because we stop learning, we stop being beginners, I think maybe children inherently know that only through conflict can they learn and grow, and they treat conflict as a learning and growth experience and when we stop doing that and we consider as a nuisance, we stop being children and we stop learning and growing.
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